Firefox 16 Aurora

Firefox 16 Aurora is out and it comes with some new features both for regular users and developers.

One small visual tweak is the better query highlighting in the AwesomBar. When searching, users now have a better highlighted result which should look cleaner and more slick.

The long awaited download panel is here. As most users may feel this way, the old download windows was one of the most annoying feature from the browser. The new download panel, which will be enabled by default, has been in development for a long time. Now you'll see a button in the top toolbar whenever you have an active or completed download, that will list the most recent download and their progress.

The built-in PDF viewer launched with Firefox 15 has been improved even more with Firefox 16 Aurora. MD5 hases in digital certificates are no longer accepted , since it's and old encryption algorithm that is very easy to crack , though still being widely used.

The Incremental Garbage Collector is now enabled by default. Thi means a more smoother performance for CPU-sensitive apps. With other versions of Firefox, the browser rean a full GC at large intervals which produced short freezes and slowdowns in the UI or web apps. Now an Incremental GC runs more often at only a portion of the memory. This is ment to make the freezes more shorter to the point of them becoming unnoticeable.

Firefox 16 Auror comes with plently of new features and tweaks to get developers excited. In this release most of CSS features are now stable, and CSS3 Animations, CSS3 Transitions, CSS3 Transforms, CSS3 Image Values and CSS3 Values & Units are all unprefixed. For a full list of CSS features that are unprefixed you can check it out here.

Also new in the latest Aurora release a new toll for the developer suit is the Developer Toolbar. This enables quick „command line” acces to plenty of features and data.

To check out Firefox 16 Aurora, you can head over to the official channel webpage to download and try it out now.